Costless Defection: How Counter-Rhetoric Neutralizes Climate Shaming
With Matias Spektor and Renan Marques.
Overview
In Western democracies, foreign climate shaming has been shown to impose audience costs on noncompliant leaders.
The Paris Agreement depends on peer pressure rather than sanctions to secure compliance. In Western democracies, foreign climate shaming has been shown to impose audience costs on noncompliant leaders, while elite counter-rhetoric has little or no effect. Using two survey experiments (N ≈ 6,100) and post-experimental focus groups in Brazil, we test whether this dynamic holds beyond the West. We find that shaming lowers incumbent support only under partial noncompliance and that targeted government counter-rhetoric—invoking historical responsibility, reciprocity, and sovereignty—fully neutralizes this effect. Qualitative evidence shows that citizens interpret foreign criticism through frames that transform foreign reputational pressure into moral vindication and national pride. The results demonstrate that peer-pressure compliance operates asymmetrically across contexts: in settings marked by post-colonial sensitivity, justifications by noncomplying leaders render defection from the Paris Agreement costless.
My Work
Selected Research
My work has appeared in Nature, International Studies Quarterly, and other outlets.
More projects
articles
Holding Ground: The Resilience of Protected Areas under Institutional Weakening
Protected areas are a cornerstone of global conservation policy, yet those located in remote regions are often viewed as inefficient because they protect forests under little immediate threat. This view assumes static institutions and stable land-use patterns. We show instead that the conservation value of protected…
Read more
article
Climate Change and the Shadow of the Future
Young people are expected to bear the most severe consequences of climate change and play a central role in climate activism. Yet political science has paid limited theoretical attention to age as a variable of interest in climate change opinion. This paper revisits the role of age in shaping climate attitudes and…
Read more
article
Beyond Jobs: Individual Attitudes Toward Foreign Direct Investment
We find that investing firms’ corrupt and environmentally damaging behavior significantly reduces public support for FDI. Recent scholarship shows that public attitudes toward foreign direct investment (FDI) are shaped by non-economic factors such as ethnocentrism, nationalism, and foreign threat perceptions. However,…
Read more
article
Determinants of Climate Change Risk Perception in Latin America
Climate change risk perceptions are subjective constructs that individuals use to interpret the potential harms of climate change and influence their engagement in mitigation and adaptation efforts. While research in high-income Western countries has identified cognitive processes, socio-cultural factors, and…
Read more
Contact Me
Let's Talk
If you are interested in knowing more about any of my projects or think we have similar interests, please feel free to contact me.
